many of the relevant Irish records have been destroyed. The researcher did find someone named Brown at the London Kensington address, who could well have been a relative, but of Ashley himself there was, unfortunately, no mention.
This is one of the difficulties. It is not easy to prove beyond doubt that the apparent memories and experiences of past lives mean that reincarnation is true. But this does not stop people trying. It occupies serious researchers, sometimes for years as with Professor Ian Stevenson. There is a popular magazine devoted to past life memories, and many people have a vested interest because they believe they were historical personages. Tina Turner, for instance, believes she was the Egyptian Pharaoh, Queen Hapshepshut. Unfortunately, even if the details gained under hypnosis are confirmed, it is almost impossible to prove that a person now living was that long-dead person. There are other possible explanations, as we shall see. Notwithstanding, experiences like those of Jenny Cockell are compelling reasons to believe. Especially for the recallee. It is usually the experience itself that convinces, not the ‘evidence’. Paula Hamilton commented that what impressed her most was that, during her regression, she felt, and spoke, as a man would.
There is, however, another reason for exploring the past other than simply curiosity or a desire to prove the truth of reincarnation. This is that the key to the present can lie there. This is what past life therapy is all about. The value of past life therapy lies not in what it may prove about your former life, or lives, but in how it can enhance your present one. Past life therapists believe they can heal the past to change the present. Certainly, in my own practice, I have seen some dramatic improvements in health and well-being. Phobias dissolve, chronic diseases disappear, emotional disturbances heal, relationships improve. Nevertheless, it does not have to be dramatic, or traumatic either. Many people simply feel better able to handle their present life.
Past Life Therapy
Being guided to a time before birth in the present life, that is, into another life, to uncover and heal the causes of problems and difficulties that have arisen in the present life.
The sense of something suddenly clicking into place, of understanding the previously inexplicable, can throw light on many of our day-to-day feelings. A woman regressed to being a much loved only child. A real ‘daddy’s girl’. She was given a pony for her birthday and was ecstatically happy. She leapt onto the pony, which bolted. She was thrown and killed. Asked what connection this had with her present life, she replied that whenever she was happy she would start to worry. There was always a vague sense of dread. She associated being happy with fear and loss. Being killed in a moment of supreme happiness in that other life made sense of her fear.
In a similar way, another woman wanted to know why she had always felt so responsible for her sister and had a compulsion to rush to her side whenever she was unwell. As a young child, this had caused her great anguish when she was sent away to school on the other side of the world. As an adult of mature years, it created many inconvenient situations, continually disrupting her life. In the regression, she was a happy healthy child, with an invalid sister. It was her duty to stay with her sister, she was told, whenever she wanted to go out to play. Indeed, her sister would beg: “Don’t leave me, promise me you will always be here.” She was, not just in that life but in the present one too. Recognizing that fact allowed her to detach from the old, no longer applicable, promise.
The result of such an experience may not always be dramatic, but it can be. It may not always have physical repercussions, but it often does. The effect of a past life can be emotionally crippling. It may also explain a great deal about present life relationships.
My first solo regression was instigated by someone saying to a friend of mine: “I see you dressed as a nun.” His method of regressing people was to ‘tune in’ to their past lives himself, and tell them what he saw. The person was then supposed to join in. It triggered a ‘flashback’ in her, but one she strenuously tried to block out. She immediately began to shake her head emphatically and to make a most distressed noise. Tears poured down her cheeks. As the ‘regressor’ was not looking at her, he did not at first notice what was happening. When he did, he simply said: “Oh, don’t want to do it? Ok, I’ll go” and did, leaving me with a woman still deeply distressed and violently shaking her head. The noise had risen to a crescendo and she was wringing her hands. Clearly something had to be done.
I took her through a difficult incarnation as a nun, one with no physical comfort at all and little spiritual sustenance. She had, apparently, been put into the convent to stop her marrying her great love, and she missed him every moment of her life. To her, love was something set aside and sacred. It had nothing to do with physical life. The regression was graphic: she had body lice and scratched at them continuously. Her clothes were heavy and uncomfortable and she pulled fitfully at them. Her hands and knees were raw from kneeling and scrubbing floors. On the rare occasion she took a bath, it was in cold water in her linen shift. She never saw herself naked. The body was anathema. Her hair had been hacked off by the mistress of the novices, and her scalp never healed properly. Interestingly enough, she commented: “And she bloody well did it in this life too.” I had to return to that comment later as I felt it had great bearing on her life now.
The only way out of that life was to take her forward through death, but she was still wearing the robes in the between life state. She took them off and burnt them. She pictured having a bath to clear the lice and fleas. We grew her hair and used lotions on her skin. She dressed herself in silken clothes. Eventually she burnt the convent down, but she kept the chapel as she had found what little sustenance and comfort she had there. All the time her language grew stronger and bluer and she was not a person who ever swore. Indeed, in her present life she prided herself on never having lost control of herself, “in anger or in passion.” Burning down the convent seemed to be a release for great feeling, of deep anger that had lain beneath the surface all through her present life.
I asked her about the ‘she did it in this life too’ comment. She explained that, as a 15 year old, she had gone out with a boy against her mother’s wishes. Her enraged mother hacked off her waist-length blonde hair with shears, cutting into her scalp as she did so. Her mother, whom she hated in her present life, had been the mistress of novices in that past life. Her great love then was her great love now. But she had not married him. Her mother had broken up the relationship. However, they had continued to see each other every week for over forty years as they were “deeply in love”. The dichotomy between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ love was strong in her. Her distaste for the body and ‘things of the flesh’ all too apparent. She had married someone merely to have children. When she had a child, the sex stopped and eventually the marriage broke down. She had never had sexual intercourse with the man she ‘loved’. She said she did not know what it was to ‘make love’. Her emotional life was frozen back in that previous life. Her difficult relationship with her mother certainly seemed to be a reflection of just how much she had hated that mistress of the novices. These were just some of the many correlations between that life and the present. Much reframing and releasing needed to be done.
The Between Life State
A state of non-physical being to which souls pass after death. It may be a bright light, a place, a colour or energy. Cultural and religious expectations influence the experience. People see what they expect to see: heaven, hell, paradise, Valhalla, or whatever. Conscious awareness and memory is retained and expanded here and an overview of all lives is possible: forwards or backwards. In some levels of the between life state, the soul may appear to be housed within a body, while in others it is non-corporeal. Healing and reframing can easily be carried out here and the effect carried forward into the present life.
Reframing
To reframe a past life experience involves changing the ‘life script’. It may entail a change of scenario, replaying
